


Death and Transparency

by ataraxistence



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (though I don't really have to tag for that either do I?), (though do I really have to tag for that in this fandom?), Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Will, Do not read if you have not watched the season 3 finale, Fix-It, I Tried, M/M, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, Murder Husbands, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Pretentious literary and biblical references, Read if you feel sad and amazed by the season 3 finale, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 06:13:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4695092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ataraxistence/pseuds/ataraxistence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will and Hannibal survive the fall, and so Will has lost his last chance of refusing to succumb to Hannibal. This is the immediate aftermath of his realisation. </p><p>In no particular order of importance, there are: sweet omelettes, cannibalism, sex, and a Houdan hen which Will immediately subconsciously adopts. The hen's name is Brunhild.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death and Transparency

**Author's Note:**

> This whole fic is just my way of trying to make myself feel better about that ending. I'm sorry I've interrupted our regularly scheduled programming on Der Erlkonig to write this, but I will put that up by the end of today, after I have done my last edits. 
> 
> The narrative thread on this is not quite linear: I wanted to interweave the immediate aftermath with what happens slightly later, like a series of disjointed scenes. I blame Francis Dolarhyde and his trippy movie reels.

When he wakes up, he’s disappointed.

The room is clean, neat, with its walls done in white and cream. The bedstead is blonde wood, birch, with clean straight lines. There's a blue and green patchwork quilt draped over his cold feet, and it looks hand-stitched. The curtains are lace. The pillows are soft sweet goosedown clothed in gentle cotton against his cheek, and Will Graham turns his face into one and tries not to cry. 

\---

“Will you come with me?” Hannibal asks gently. 

Will could almost hate him, for the caress in his voice as he says it. 

She'll know you're coming,” Will tells him. _We're coming,_ he does not say. “I warned her,” he adds, with a touch of defiance in his voice. 

“You need not have,” Hannibal chides laughingly. “Bedelia is smart enough to know that.” 

\---

The little white room that he’s been laid to rest in has a little desk in it, a marvelous thing with slender legs and six closed drawers and a clean surface. Together they imply that many letters were written on it, and read, and cried over, and those letters may have been stored in it with little sachets of lavender. From his place in bed, Will can see a little note placed dead centre, with a little blue stone holding it down. For him to read.

But right now Will is too large to walk to the desk, to reach for the note and the little blue stone. He feels, at that moment, enormous, engorged, swollen with feeling. The waters of the Atlantic buffet him still. But the only blue here is the tame quilt lying there, keeping him warm. 

He has escaped the ocean. He has escaped death. 

And so must have Hannibal Lecter, because Will cannot live without him. 

Will cannot _actually have lived_ without him, for that matter. 

He wonders, sometimes, at Hannibal's capacity for feats of physical exertion. He remembers the snow on the ground at Muskrat Farm, and he knows the distance between the Verger mansion and Wolf Trap still. Hannibal was wounded then, of course. And now he knows he will forever remember the rough, cold water of the resounding sea, and that then too, Hannibal was more wounded than he. 

Hannibal has the strength of some subhuman, supermythic beast. Has, within himself, preternatural silence and dignity. Has the composure to hunt and kill and _instruct_ Will's amateurish efforts with Dolarhyde's knife, even while bleeding from a bullet to the abdomen. 

And he didn't even get to have the wine, Will thinks, how unfair. 

\---

They get in the car. Will drives them, and Hannibal chooses the music. It’s Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2. Will reads thunderous longing in its notes.   

\---

Will succumbs. He sleeps, and wakes, and sleeps again. And by the time his body, despite its exhaustion, can sleep no more, it is just dawning rose-gold in the sky. The note now reads, in Hannibal’s copperplate handwriting, “I'm in the garden.”

The staircase is more blonde wood beneath its hands as Will gingerly descends to the ground floor. A dressing gown in blue had been neatly left for him on the back of the door. He’d put it on. Used the bathroom. Brushed his hair. Brushed his teeth. Done all the normal things that a normal man would do, despite the fact that he no longer feels like one. He has a bandage on his face, and a bandage on his shoulder, and so, soon, he will have the visible scar on his face to prove his abnormality beyond any doubt.

He can’t think about that now, though. So instead, he wanders through the kitchen, and stands in the open doorway in his bare feet, resting an arm against the doorframe. 

Hannibal's hair is loose gold and silver in the dawn as he turns to greet Will. Some Gordian creature in Will's chest uncurls and lies purring at the sight of him. 

Hannibal has a plump hen tucked under his arm, with its mottled feathers all fluffy. “Hello, Will.” 

“Hello, Hannibal,” Will replies, nonplussed. 

Hannibal hands him the hen. 

It makes a fluttery cooing noise and fidgets until Will has it cradled to its satisfaction. It is very warm in his arms, and Will and the hen watch as Hannibal walks back to the coop. 

“An omelette for breakfast for both of us. Brunhild has been very obliging with the eggs.” 

Will stares down at… Brunhild, who has puffed up a little more at the sound of her name. He strokes the soft feathers and she clucks at him. 

When Hannibal brings the eggs back, Will turns just enough to let him past. They brush - skin to skin, arm to arm, no static leaping between them to startle each other. Will sets Brunhild down and follows Hannibal into the kitchen proper, but Brunhild follows _him_. 

Will turns to her and nudges her back out with his foot. "No," he says firmly, and she cocks her head at him before acquiescing and strutting off into the yard. 

“You are wonderful with animals,” Hannibal notes warmly, cracking eggs one-handed, discarding the shells deftly, whisking with a silver fork simultaneously. 

That makes Will think of the dogs, and then after that of Molly, and of Walter. Sorrow walks lightly across his heart, but Hannibal, head bent to his task, does not see it cross Will's face. So Will lets it wash over him like waves, and pass away, and he sits at the kitchen table, and immerses himself in watching Hannibal work, the sleeves of his jumper neatly rolled up where Will would have just shoved it up with no care for the wool. Cast iron skillet. Fire. Butter. Eggs. Then the short, sharp jerks of the arm, to free the omelette and toss it, with all the elegance that Will has never particularly been able to manage.

The beaten egg, when Hannibal slides it onto a plate, is pale yellow and fluffy. Hannibal twists a jar open and dabs a long line of blackcurrant jam down the very heart of it before rolling it up deftly. He dusts the top with a smidgen of powdered sugar.

“ _Omelette confiture_.” He places it between them before settling down to the other side of the narrow table.

“A sweet omelette?” Will says, raising an eyebrow, but he’s already picking up his fork.

The first bite is sweet and tart and savoury all at once – the heat of the omelette contrasts beautifully with the coolness of the jam, and there’s a starburst of sugar on his tongue before it melts away to the more conventional flavours of an omelette, coinciding with the tang of sharp blackcurrants.

Feeling greatly daring, Will brushes his foot against Hannibal’s bare ankle. Hannibal’s expression does not change, but his pleasure manifests itself in a little pressure back against his foot.

“You should eat as well,” Will suggests, and Hannibal obliges.   

\---

The car pulls up to Bedelia du Maurier’s house in the gloaming. Baltimore shines in the darkness and the house is surprisingly silent – no sign of the watchers that Will would have expected.

Jack Crawford must have begun to search further afield, now, or perhaps he’s actually convinced that Will and Hannibal have truly gone to their murky rest; he would no doubt be apoplectic to know that Hannibal and Will have remained so close to him.

That the sea has treacherously hidden them under the its beautiful navy-black waves, and that they are now a remorseless tribe of two, and Will is lost to him forever.

Will is lost to himself forever, but he has found himself in Hannibal.

\---

“You swam us ashore,” Will says. Hannibal, who is carrying the coffee cups, nods. The breakfast plate lies, unattended, in the sink. Hannibal has suggested they take coffee in the living room, and Will has followed him there. More light wood, more white, more tints of blue. The rooms are so wholly unlike Hannibal’s dark and rich aesthetic. It’s almost IKEA, Will realises, but only if IKEA used solid birch and maple and pine instead of cheap particleboard. The idea is so absurd he shares it with Hannibal, who only says, in long-suffering tones, that the designer is Kristina Dam.

They have coffee on the sofa – cushions in warm green with blue threads shot through. And this time it is Hannibal who embraces Will, and Will clutches at his jumper, wrinkling the cashmere. They sink together, the cushions encouraging them to sit closer.

There is no cliff here to save Will from the joy of holding Hannibal in his arms, and of being held in return.

“Suicide is the enemy, you said.” Will leans his head on Hannibal’s shoulder, half for the pleasure of seeing Hannibal’s minute quiver as the breath from Will’s words touches his throat.

“An enemy you have defeated, now,” Hannibal points out. His breath stirs Will’s hair in turn as he turns his face to Will’s. “And now in the light of that death your passions have become clear, have they not?”

There is no cliff here to save Will from the memory of the blood in the moonlight.

“You knew we would live,” Will mused. “You let me try, knowing that I would not succeed.” Knowing that Will would be his, when they emerged alive and battered on the other side.

“Just as you knew that I would surrender if you refused me,” Hannibal murmured. Will fought down the urge to say, _what, you’re still on about that_? “You let me try and fail as well.”

There is no more speaking of what is owed and taken between them.

\---

Here they are now.

A glorious scent permeates the house. There’s something cooking in the kitchen already.

They find Bedelia du Maurier lying in bed, her face drawn as she sleeps uneasily. She wears a thin tank top and running shorts. Her left leg is neatly bandaged, missing from the thigh down.

“Oh, Bedelia,” Will whispers. 

\---

Hannibal suggests they go back upstairs so that Hannibal can get his supplies and check on Will’s wounds. At the doorway to the little white room, which Will has left ajar, he hesitates and asks, “Where are you?” It hasn’t escaped his notice that the little white room has only a single bed.

“Down the hallway from you,” Hannibal replies, pointing out another door.

Will says, firmly, “Let’s go there, then. Your stuff is in there, isn’t it?”

It is, but that’s not the reason, of course. Neither of them say so, but Hannibal takes Will’s hand to lead him the six steps down the hallway. Will’s chest gives a thump, like there’s a hart in the spring trapped within him.

 _This_ room is much more Hannibalesque. Blonde wood is still the primary feature, but there’s dark trim on the armoire and the desk in the corner, and a carpet in light gold and dark crimson on the floor. Hannibal gestures Will to the double bed and fetches a battered leather doctor’s bag from the wardrobe.

They begin with the chest wound. It has, of course, been beautifully stitched, and Hannibal looks quite satisfied with its progress and his handiwork as he cleans it with a little antiseptic, redresses it and puts the bandages back on. Will leaves his shirt off.

Hannibal leans in a little closer than necessary when he peels the bandage off Will’s face.

“How does it look?” Will asks.

“It’ll scar, I’m afraid,” Hannibal says evenly.

“Does that anger you?”

“It angers me that someone else put his mark on you,” Hannibal agrees. “The degree of possessiveness I feel towards you is not inconsiderable, and I feel, strangely, that his death has thwarted me of vengeance.”

“You want retribution for _this_ particular act,” Will says, his tone dry as sawdust. “You might as well piss on me and have done with it.”

Hannibal’s face tells him exactly what he thinks of that idea.

“Or a collar and a tag,” Will adds, thinking of dogs. The way Hannibal’s breath clicks in his throat, though, draws him back to reality. “No,” he says firmly.

Hannibal pauses, then subsides, wearing what passes for a rueful grin on that face. “No, I did not think so,” he acquiesces. “Although you must admit that the image has a certain appeal.”

“For you, maybe.” Despite the dismissive words, though, he allows Hannibal’s hands to linger on his cheek. “I have had enough of being Jack’s foxhound. I will not be yours.”

“The mongoose under the house has escaped his servitude, then,” Hannibal murmurs.

“Besides, Dolarhyde could have been yours,” Will points out, letting Hannibal trace the edges of his scar. “He adored you.”

“He was not you,” Hannibal says simply.

Faced with that statement, Will blurts out: “I asked Bedelia if you were in love with me.”

“And did she tell you the truth?”

“Yes,” Will whispers. He knows it now, simply from the way Hannibal’s amber-brown eyes seem to have focused on Will’s mouth.

“It must have galled her to say so.”

“It did,” Will acknowledges. “Will it gall you to say so, one day?”

“Are you looking for reassurances, Will?”

“Will you give them?”

“If anyone is in need of reassurances, it is the man who has spent three years of his life in an asylum.”

“You were free to roam the halls of your mind palace.”

“Where you dwelled.”  

“Did I have the run of the rooms there?” Will asks, leaning his face up. Hannibal’s light tracery against Dolarhyde’s scar changes with the tilt of his hand, letting Will’s cheek turn into the palm. It becomes a cradle instead.

“You excavated and demolished whole wings,” Hannibal says, his voice wry. “Viciously hurled things out of windows. Rewired the place to suit yourself and scattered dog hair everywhere.”

“Oh,” Will says meaninglessly, and parts his mouth to be kissed.

When Hannibal’s lips touch his and as the Devil’s breath intermingles with his, Will understands that somewhere within him, the whole fragile construction of his resolve has only just begun to fall in earnest. As he slides a hand underneath the jumper that Hannibal is wearing and as Hannibal’s other hand falls between his shoulderblades and begins to press him closer, he realises that he has been, all this while, poised at the top rungs of a glass ladder that reaches unsteadily upwards to the heavens, and now he is finally content to release his death grip on the sides, and to allow his feet to succumb to Hannibal’s Plutonian gravity, and to rush downwards as the shards come tumbling around him.

Hannibal’s hands are warm and his mouth is practiced, and Will thinks, _This is a mouth that eats people_. _This is the mouth of Hell_ , and shudders, and where Alana Bloom might have feared, he lets Hannibal trace his upper lip with his tongue, and they touch and shudder and grasp each other closer.

They fall again, only to have the sheets arrest their headlong plunge.

Hannibal lifts his head from Will, and his eyes are wondering.

“If that was meant to be reassurance,” Hannibal admits, “I am not sure that it has done what it was supposed to do.”

“You’re not reassured at all,” Will ironically assures him. “You’re terrified now.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says. The morning is growing outside their window. “I did not know that that would happen.”

What an admission of weakness! Will feels a surge of unholy triumph, for he has muzzled him, now – Hannibal’s mind, the Devil’s mind, in thrall to Will –

“I have you now.” Will beckons Hannibal down to kiss him again.

\---

“I’ll wake her,” Hannibal says. “You should set the table – ”

“No,” Will moves further into the room as Hannibal waits by the door. It’s becoming easier, and easier, to say no to Hannibal, and becoming harder and harder, to say no to the person that he’s becoming. There’s no saving himself, now, not from this one. “I’ll wake her.”

“The appropriate drugs are in the case by her bureau,” Hannibal nods. “You may wish to give her a large dose of the opiates.”

Will heads to the dresser in answer. Hannibal departs, and soon the reassuring noises of a table moving and cutlery being set trickle through to the room. But before he wakes Bedelia –

Will decides to take a quick look through her closet.

He picks out the blue dress, with its plunging neckline, and lays it out at the foot of the bed. Her hair will remain the way it is, in its luxurious, white-blonde curls, and the jewellery box on her bureau yields sparkling drops for her ears. He strips her, and notices, quite clinically, that she has a beautiful body for a woman her age. He dresses her, careful not to wrinkle her dress, and affixes the glittering crystals to her ears.

Then he deftly locates the vein in her elbow, and injects her, and whispers, “Wake up, Bedelia. You’ll be late for dinner.”

He watches in satisfaction as her eyes flutter, and as they focus, finally, on him. This is _his_ design.

\---

They kiss, and kiss, and lie entangled as the day grows older around them.

They allow their hands to roam, but there is no urgency to their touch. Not yet.

“Who owns this place?” Will asks.

“I do,” Hannibal says.

“It’s not very… you.”

“Most of the time a pleasant old lady by the name of Eleanor lives here. She pays a vastly reduced rent and has never seen her landlord.”

Will’s heart does a little twist. “And where’s she now?”

Hannibal regards him for a moment. “And if I said she was dead?”

“I would ask you what she died of,” Will replies, letting his fingers play up and down Hannibal’s spine, reinforcing the message with the unsubtlety of touch.

Hannibal smiles indulgently, as though he were rewarding Will’s trust with an appropriate tidbit of information. “In truth, her older daughter Susannah suddenly won a trip to Hawai’i and has taken her mother with her for the next three weeks.”

Will laughs. “We’ll be long gone by then.”

“Yes, we will.” Hannibal refrains from pointing out that they could have done this years ago, with Abigail in tow. There is no need to pour salt in the wounds – and besides, he is starting to understand that they could not truly have done this years ago. That was not Will’s awakening, and Hannibal realises, with the benefit of hindsight, that then he might have become tired of Will, and in turn heartbroken by the inconstancy and imperfection of the beloved. And then it would have ended badly for all of them.

Today’s Will Graham is a very different creature altogether.

\---

“You,” she gasps.

“Me,” Will agrees. “We got your dinner invitation, Bedelia.”

\---

The leg is the centerpiece of the table, of course. It’s set and still steaming faintly, decorated lavishly with ti leaves and tropical fruit in what is clearly a cheeky nod to the Hawai’ian vacation that old-lady Eleanor and her daughter have been sent on.

Will leaves Bedelia seated, groggy but lucid, in a chair, and goes to the kitchen to look for Hannibal. He finds him carefully carving little tomato roses at high speed, and offers, “May I help with anything?”

“There is wine over there,” Hannibal says. “Will you decant it and let it breathe, please?”

They bustle through a series of small tasks, and even as Hannibal deftly navigates a kitchen that is not his own, he makes a point of brushing Will. Touching him. At one point he takes a deep sniff from the decanter, then wanders over just to bury his nose in the nape of Will’s neck.

“You did this the last time,” Will notes, taking cutlery out of the drawer that Bedelia keeps it in. “Scenting me for encephalitis.”

“You smell better now,” Hannibal murmurs. “And none of that atrocious aftershave, of course.” But he offers Will the tiniest smile as he says it.  

Will thinks, a little giddily, that this is _the honeymoon period_. When even the other person’s quirks and faults seem attractive, simply because they are part of what makes the other party unique and irreplaceable. When lovers look at each other and think, _how lucky I am, to have found you in all the wide and stretching world…_

He turns around and kisses Hannibal a bit more, just to feel the lock of Hannibal’s arms around him again, the crucible of his body and mind, transforming Will bit by bit. Hannibal’s thin lips are surprisingly soft. These are the lips that tore out Francis Dolarhyde’s throat.

Hannibal’s hands slip further down. One hand caresses a hip while its twin comes to rest gently at the small of Will’s back, teasing. Will takes a step closer. It brings them into such close proximity that they’re almost touching, but not quite, with the centimetre of air between them charged and electric.

“Can you smell it?” Will whispers. “How aroused I am.”

Hannibal’s pupils dilate at the words, and a fine shiver runs through him. “Yes.” The pressure of his hands against Will’s body increases, though Will plants his feet and resists for a moment. “I can. Would it be unwelcome if I told you how much I want you?”

“No.” Will closes the gap between them, surrendering to the pressure of his hands, their bodies colliding as they slot together. One of them groans at the contact. Will can’t be sure it’s not him, and so he grinds his hips closer in apology. This time the groan is definitely Hannibal.

Reluctantly Will forces himself to step away. “We’ll be late for dinner, Hannibal,” he says, breathless and flushed.

He watches, fascinated, as Hannibal visibly forces himself back under control. It’s like watching some creature repack itself into its shell. “And that would be rude, wouldn’t it?”  

“Yes,” Will agrees. “It would be.”

They compose themselves and walk to the office, where Hannibal has set up the dining table. “Hello again, Bedelia,” Hannibal greets.

“Hannibal,” she murmurs.

“Hands on the table, please,” Will instructs. “Let go of the oyster fork, Bedelia.” He’s come a long way and would like to avoid being stabbed in the other cheek. “Would you care for wine?”

“Yes, please.”

Hannibal settles himself at the other end of the table. Will pours deftly for all three of them – keeping a wary eye on the loose clench of Bedelia’s fist around her fork – and settles himself midway between them.

“Kalua… _pork_ … in liquid mesquite smoke,” Bedelia introduces, her voice steady despite the slight slurring caused by the drugs in her system. “A start to the holiday, for the two of you.”

“You know I don’t enjoy the tropics,” Hannibal says admonishingly, getting up to carve the meat.

“But now the question is: does Will?” Bedelia asks.

It jars Will, to see the two of them discuss him as though he’s elsewhere. For a moment, Will sees a glimpse into their elegant life together in Florence: both of them dressed for dinner in all their finery, a perfectly matched pair, and him the scruffy interloper at their table.

Hannibal, however, serves him first, and turns to him, breaking the two-way nature of the conversation. “I rather suspect you would prefer the cold. Venice in winter, perhaps. As the entropy devours the city and the waters rise in the rain.”

He can see Hannibal’s design now – the two of them in some borrowed _palazzo_ , Will determined to resist the crumbling grandeur of the old city as Hannibal immerses himself in it, both of them knowing that the city is slowly dying around them. Hannibal’s luxuriant tastes sprouting like weeds in the corners of Will’s cracked personality, Hannibal acculturating Will, poisoning him with Rachmaninoff and truffles and the sharpness of manchego cheese and Ethiopian coffees.

“I would like that,” Will replies, as Hannibal settles the plate of meat in front of Bedelia.

“You would, wouldn’t you,” Bedelia tells him, her smile half-radiant in the candlelight. “As much as I enjoyed Florence.”

“Possibly more,” Will allows, as Hannibal serves himself and settles down at the head of the table, beaming at the both of them.

They’re silent for a moment, as they all take a first bite. It’s Bedelia who asks, with the anxiety of those eager to please: “How is it?”

“Delicious.” Will answers for himself and Hannibal, and despite her natural composure and the numbing overlay of drugs, he can see the fear in Bedelia’s eyes, as he had when she had clutched her whiskey glass in their last therapy session together. He realises that, until that precise moment, Bedelia had not quite believed in his becoming – the death, and rebirth, of William Graham.

And in his eyes she sees her death, and is afraid all over again.

\---

“I told her to pack her bags.” They’re back in the white house, both of them showered clean.

“And soon we shall have to pack ours.” Hannibal nibbles down on Will’s cheekbone, and is rewarded by a buck of Will’s hips, hard and hot against his.

“Jack will refocus the search here in Baltimore.”

“Must we talk about Jack at a time like this?” It’s very strange, how Hannibal is sometimes almost petulant around Will. He is, in secret, a terrible romantic.

“He’ll find this house,” Will murmurs, rolling Hannibal gently over onto his uninjured side, insinuating his leg in between Hannibal’s. They part easily enough for him. “I quite like the idea of us leaving something for him to find.”

Will wonders if Alana will hear of it, and know that this is Will’s way of taking her place just as he took Bedelia’s.

“You are a terrible romantic,” Hannibal tells him.

Will laughs. “I was just thinking the same about you.” In lazy accord, they undo buttons and untuck belts. Will takes the clothing from Hannibal’s unresisting hands and discards them carelessly on the floor, ignoring Hannibal’s barely suppressed flinch with a smirk. There is something to be said about this. Perhaps after Venice, Will will take Hannibal to the places which remind him of Louisiana. Maybe they’ll visit Southeast Asia, and Will will get to see Hannibal in white cotton shirts, sweating his way through the marketplaces of Yangon and Mandalay. Perhaps Hannibal will also be changed by him.

“I’ve never done this before,” Will says. “Been with a man,” he adds, needlessly, for the flare of pleasure in Hannibal’s eyes again. Hannibal’s body is bare and it is almost dawn again – they have been up all night, working. Will slides gently down the bed, wanders past Hannibal’s hips and straining cock, starts at the foot and caresses the fine bone-work of his ankle, touches his calves and kisses the back of his knees, wraps both hands around the thigh as if gauging it for market, all the while thinking, _this is the body that swam us out of the sea, this is the body with which he kills as he pleases_.

Will’s so turned on, by this point, that opening his mouth to take Hannibal’s cock down his throat is almost an instinct. “Ah!” Hannibal hisses, and moans something unintelligible in what Will assumes has to be Lithuanian. Will pushes until it triggers his gag reflex, and finds that he can think, coldly and clinically now, about the ear pushed down his throat.

This is much better. The heat and salt of Hannibal on his tongue, the unfamiliar stretch of his mouth, Hannibal’s garbled words of pleasure, and at the back of his mind, the slight, whispering temptation to _bite_ –

Will gives him a hint of teeth, and Hannibal’s hands tighten in his hair. “Will. _Please_ – ”

Will relents, knowing that he has found yet another leash of sensuality with which to strangle Hannibal. He gives himself fully over to the unknown pleasures of it, imagines his mouth red with the flush of effort as he pushes himself down on Hannibal’s cock again, hollowing his cheeks for Hannibal’s pleasure as women have done for him in the past. He takes it out of his mouth and circles the head with a pointed tongue, and looks up to catch Hannibal’s gaze just as he dips his tongue into the slit at the tip. Hannibal cries out again, and grasps Will, who lets him escape with a wet _pop_ sound, obscene in the peaceful silence of their house.

Hannibal’s eyes are blown black, and Will suspects he’s not much better. He’s fully hard just from going down on Hannibal, desperate for touch and yet entirely willing to restrain himself.

“Would you like to fuck me?” he asks, proud of how conversational and bland he keeps his voice.  

“May I?” Hannibal, by contrast, is almost trembling.

“You may,” Will says.

Hannibal surges forward and begins to arrange Will with easy competence – much like cooking an omelette – and Will goes, under his hands. Condoms and a little jar of lubricant. A pillow shoved under him and his legs firmly guided apart, the cool air of the bedroom raising goosebumps on his thighs for the brief moment before Hannibal settles between them, heedless of the bullet wound on his side and the spectacular mottling of bruises on both of them. Will doesn’t tell him to slow down, doesn’t tell him to stop: he merely hisses as Hannibal breaches him with a single finger.

Soon, it’s two. Then three, and then Hannibal twists his fingers and Will gasps, “Oh god _Hannibal_ ,” shocked by the sudden pleasure of it.

“Is it good, then?” Hannibal croons, leaning over him and doing it again.

Will makes a small mewling sound that he’d never thought to hear himself make, a high _ah_ in the back of his throat. “You – you don’t need to ask that –”

“Reassure me, Will.”

“Oh god, you bastard – Hannibal, it feels amazing, don’t stop– ” It’s like once he’s started speaking there’s no stopping the words which tumble desperately from his lips, even if they consist of moans and pleas and praise for the focused, near-desperate way that Hannibal fingers him open, the surgicial, anatomical precision with which Hannibal brushes his prostate over and over again.

“It’s like murder,” Hannibal pants, “Isn’t it, Will? The kind of pleasure that you never sought and never knew would be this good –”

“Damn you,” Will yells, suddenly furious, and he jabs Hannibal right in the still-healing wound – not hard enough to break the still-healing skin, but enough that Hannibal falls back with a stifled shout of pain. Will bowls him over with a hard shove and crawls over him, fury in his eyes as he pins Hannibal. He could tear out his throat from this distance. He could kill Hannibal as Hannibal killed Dolarhyde, because Hannibal has never appeared more vulnerable to him, naked and alone with Will in this lovely white house. “Yes, damn you. It’s beautiful, I told you that on the cliff, and it feels good, Hannibal. It _was_ good to see you again. And it felt good to kill her, because she wanted you, wanted you to want her, and now she can’t have you, because I do, don’t I? _Because this feels good to you too._ ”

But instead of biting out Hannibal’s bared throat, Will braces himself and sinks down, impaling himself on Hannibal’s cock, their eyes never leaving each other. Will moans and throws back his head when he’s fully seated, and the storm of violence passes, only to be replaced by something else equally feral.

Will loses track of how long he rides Hannibal, or at what point Hannibal flips him over again, putting him on his back and pushing, slow and steady and rhythmic, into the clench of his body, Will’s legs encircled around him. _It’s 5.19 am. I’m in Baltimore, Maryland. My name is Will Graham,_ he says to himself, but the crackle of pleasure thrumming up his spine is indomitable, scattering thoughts like lilies in a storm. 

“You don’t want me to be gentle, do you, Will?” The snap of Hannibal’s hips is almost savage, now, and pleasure is building in Will like a bruise, like a bad case of internal bleeding, a brain hemorrhage waiting to happen.

“No.” Will’s breath hitches around the word. The admission is almost a sob. “I don’t want you to be anything other than you are.”

Hannibal’s snarl of triumph is strange and savage – the sound of a lion over a kill, not a man in bed with a lover. He reaches down and grasps Will’s cock, which has been untouched all this while – and that’s enough. Will comes with a full-body tremor, every single muscle feeling like it’s been wrenched from his control in some cresting wave of ecastasy. Even here, Hannibal has him, though: Hannibal strokes him through it, his hand relentless as Will whimpers weakly, and it only takes a few more thrusts before he follows Will over the edge. Will’s body tears the orgasm from him like some precious thing, and as they collapse against each other, for a while the only sound in the room is their labored breathing and the new morning coming tremulously through the curtain.    

\---

When they find Bedelia du Maurier’s corpse, it will be very beautiful still. They have been willing to allow her that much. But on her face, carved carefully, are these words, and Jack Crawford will read them and tremble in hatred, and Frederick Chilton will hear of them and hold on to life with furious tenacity, and Alana Bloom will come to know of it, and resolve to hide her family harder:

_every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves, and among the rocks of the mountains, and they cried unto the mountains and the rocks:_

_Fall on us! Hide us, from the face of He who sits on the Throne –_

**Author's Note:**

> The title, and some of the lines Hannibal speaks to Will, borrow from Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote very moving existential philosophy about death and suicide and depression, including this particular quotation: 
> 
> _Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances._
> 
> Another two sources which I wish to acknowledge are Melville’s timeless meditation of the treachery and danger of the subtle sea, and its “remorseless tribes”, and Hannibal’s choice of Venice in the winter for his and Will’s honeymoon owes everything to Joseph Brodsky’s _Watermark_ and Jan Morris’s _Venice_. I intend to visit it myself, soon! I wanted them to be in Italy, because Hannibal clearly adores it, but not in Florence, because he went there with Bedelia. My next choice would have been Rome, because there would have been lots of rude tourists for Hannibal to eat. 
> 
> Bedelia’s face-carving is, of course, from Revelations, and is a blatant, if blasphemous, tribute to the notion of “The Wrath of the Lamb”. 
> 
> I wrote this piece to deal with my feelings about the season finale, essentially. I hope you have enjoyed it, and if it reading it helps fill the missing ache in your heart as much as writing it did mine, I will consider myself well-satisfied. I would, of course, be grateful for any kind words or constructive criticism that you would like to leave me!


End file.
